West Sonoma Coast is Sonoma County’s newest American Viticultural Area

After a hard-fought campaign that lasted more than a decade, wineries in the cool coastal reaches of Sonoma County now have the ability to print “West Sonoma Coast” on their labels, with the addition of a new American Viticultural Area (AVA) to the wine industry landscape.

West Sonoma Coast is the 19th AVA in Sonoma County. The West Sonoma Coast Vintners, the association of wineries and growers who pushed for the new AVA, announced the Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau’s approval of the new AVA on Monday.

AVAs are grape-growing areas with boundaries designated by the federal government. A wine’s AVA is often listed on its label and can be a marketing tool for wineries. For a new AVA to be approved, petitioners must prove their region is a territory worthy of distinction in terms of its soils, climate and topography.

With grapes first planted in West Sonoma Coast in 1817, the vintners association contended that their region is unique because of the fog that rolls in from the nearby Pacific Ocean. The result, they said, are wines that deliver elegance equivalent to their Burgundian counterparts in Europe, wines that are both lower in alcohol and higher in acidity.

Twenty-eight wineries pushed for this new designation. The West Sonoma Coast AVA is a subset of the already-existing Sonoma Coast AVA and covers 141,800 acres, including 1,000 planted to grapevines. It encompasses land east of the Pacific Ocean, south of the Mendocino County border, north of the Petaluma Gap AVA and west of the Russian River AVA. The West Sonoma Coast Vintners Association filed its first draft in 2015, with later revisions to eliminate partial overlaps of AVAs.

The AVA distinction is long overdue for many of the vintners who say the Sonoma Coast AVA is too large and vague, spanning 500,000 acres, with some wineries in it relatively far from the ocean. West Coast vineyards close to the ocean are often 10 degrees cooler than wineries farther inland. They argue it’s not fair that other wineries should benefit from the cachet of their bottled fog when their wines don’t have a clear maritime influence.

Ted Lemon, president of the West Sonoma Coast Vintners and vintner of Sebastopol’s Littorai Wines, said the AVA designation was paramount.

“During the pioneer years of the early 1990s, many of us came specifically to this long, slender region to make wine and referred to this area as the ‘true’ Sonoma coast,” Lemon said, referring to the decade when people were just starting to plant vineyards in some of the most remote, rugged places on the Sonoma coast.

“We wanted to distinguish this area from the Sonoma Coast AVA, which runs to Chalk Hill and the Carneros,” he added. “We felt that an injustice was done to this region before it even existed in most people’s minds.”

What distinguishes the new AVA can be summed up in a comparison of yields, Lemon said. Whereas vineyards in the West Sonoma Coast AVA might yield just 1.5 tons of grapes per acre, it’s easy to achieve almost three times that amount in many areas of the Sonoma Coast AVA.

Known for its bohemian culture, west Sonoma County is filled with boutique wineries that produce 5,000 cases or fewer a year, because it’s not easy to farm with its steep ridges, fog and the San Andreas Fault. But these small producers say they make up for the challenges with their prices, because they can sell their wines for $10 to $15 more than wines produced in the neighboring the Russian River Valley AVA.

Some of the most prestigious labels to benefit from the new AVA distinction are wineries that are best known for their cool-climate chardonnays and pinot noirs, such as Littorai Wines in Sebastopol, Alma Fria Wines in Occidental, Peay Vineyards in Cloverdale, Marine Layer Wines and Flowers Winery in Healdsburg and Hirsch Vineyards in Cazadero.

Carroll Kemp, partner and winemaker of Alma Fria Wines, said the new AVA gives wineries in the region camaraderie with a shared vision.

“We needed a place to call our own, an AVA, and now that we have that, we can share these experiences with the world at large and everyone can join in,” Kemp said. “Back in 2011, when we came together to launch the West Sonoma Coast Vintners, the wine world was beginning to understand something we knew intimately. Namely, that the wines emanating from Sonoma’s coastal mountain ranges were expanding the possibilities of California wine.”